yes, well

[click image]

...

Seems to me those imported items are all easy enough to produce at home. Nobody does toilet paper or tampons in the whole country? Soap? Fer fucksakes, SOAP? No. There's a capitalist resistance firmly ensconced and it needs to be convinced to shut up and function. Is Maduro just not smart enough for the job? Or is he too soft for it? WTF?

Where's his intelligence service? Feeding at the trough?

Is it 100% terror of the extra-virulent fast-acting cancer? If you weed out the provocateurs and traitors and not fear vilification by the psychopaths:

The ruin of Mercosur can't happen if the individual states function. Yes, the opposition from the psychopaths is FIERCE, but if you don't succumb to the inducements of greed they have no hold, and if you deal with the infiltrators and the traitors they've bought, you are free.

You are hypnotized to think Fidel's incarceration of opposition was heinous. He threw people in jail who were working to get Cuba back under the control of psychopaths. Nobody wants to do that to people. We ALL know that greed and the urge to insure the future of our families are hard "instincts" to combat. Obviously. That's why the psychopaths are this successful.

Hugo Chávez had people, ordinary citizens, boots on the ground in every aspect of his freeing Venezuela from psychopaths. He felt out their hiding holes and fumigated them. He was willing to pay the price. He paid it, but everyone around him was cowed by that instead of made more determined.

Somehow, with enough brain washing, we can watch millions of soldiers die in the performance of psychopaths' sick imperatives as though it is only right and heroic, but use that kind of altruism making sure your people eat? Not so much.